Description
Sometimes it’s hard to follow a recipe using fresh tomatoes because you never know how many tomatoes you’ll have at any given time. This post has a scalable formula to follow. Happy cooking!
Ingredients
- 600 g peeled and milled* fresh San Marzano or Roma tomatoes, or 23 oz. can of peeled tomatoes.
- 30 g minced garlic
- 6 tsp. olive oil
- 6 g freshly chopped basil
- 6 g freshly chopped parsley
- Salt and pepper to taste
- Knob of butter (optional, but highly recommended.)
Method
- Prep the tomatoes
- Bring a large pot pot of water to a boil. Remove the stems and cut a small x into the base of the tomatoes, just breaking the skin. Carefully place the tomatoes in boiling water for no more than 20 seconds. Remove and place in a bowl. When cool enough to handle, peel the skin away from the flesh of the tomato. It should be pretty easy if you start at the “x” that you cut in the end.
- Crush the tomatoes with your hands, removing any obviously tough stems or left over skin. Empty the tomatoes into a food mill with a medium grade disk and mill until nothing but seeds and dry tissue.
- Cook the sauce In a sauce pan or 4 qt. pot, sweat the garlic in the oil on low heat until the garlic is soft and translucent. Do not allow to brown.
- Toss in the chopped basil and sauté for 30 seconds before emptying your tomato puree into the pan.
- Raise the temperature to medium-high heat and allow the tomato mixture to reduce until it will coat the back of a wooden spoon.* This can take anywhere from 10 to 30 minutes depending on the liquid/fiber ratio of your tomato puree.
- Toss in the parsley just before you serve. Don’t cook the parsley in the sauce for more than 10 minutes. It can get bitter. Salt and pepper to taste after the sauce has reduced as much as you want it to. Toss your optional knob of butter in right at the end.**
NOTES
*The quantity of reduction depends on how much paste your tomatoes produced. My tomatoes are usually fairly fibrous so I don’t need to reduce the sauce for too long. I reduced it by about 100 ml. before I got the texture I wanted.
**Look, I know that butter isn’t a traditional part of this sauce. But there are a metric ton of dairy-protein-soluble flavonoids in this thing, and it’d be a shame to miss out on this opportunity to release them.